Storm Warnings

The aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk nosed into the waters of San Diego harbor last week to end a marathon 9 1/2-month tour at sea and to face a bitter post-mortem on one of the worst race riots in modern naval history. The sights and the sounds of the homecoming were mostly friendly, with helium-filled OPERATION WELCOME balloons lifting off the pier and mothers of crewmen's children born since the ship sailed waving from a special stand. But as the giant vessel came to port, two black crewmen, framed against the disk of the radar screen, lifted their fists in the black power salute.

The outline of the riot was known before the Kitty Hawk docked: a six-hour-long melee in which sailors attacked each other with chains and pipes, resulting in 46 injuries and 28 arrests. The full details of the violence will probably not be known until the end of the current court-martial proceedings against 22 black crew members, if then. However, TIME Correspondent Donn Downing interviewed several crew members of the Kitty Hawk after it docked and pieced together much of the atmosphere that led to the riot. One inevitable conclusion to be drawn from those interviews is that the trouble might have been avoided if the ship's captain had paid full heed to storm warnings, which had been flapping for weeks and months before.

According to crewmen, tensions began to mount on the Kitty Hawk almost as soon as Captain Marland W. Townsend Jr. took command in June. Formal and aloof, Townsend replaced Owen Oberg, a popular commanding officer who was given to moving among his crew and not above on occasion going over the side of the ship in a bosun's chair to wield a symbolic chip hammer. "He treated everyone as a minority of one," explained one sailor. Oberg had a way of sympathizing with the crew even when passing out an unpopular order, like the frequent extensions to the ship's tour of duty off the coast of Viet Nam. Recalled one crew member: "Ob would say, 'Hey, we're going back and we can't do anything about it.' He was cool. You knew there was a guy up there who knew you were alive."

Townsend was a different breed of leader. On the very rare occasions he was seen by the crew, he was usually accompanied by his Marine guard. He seldom went on the intercom to discuss events on the ship, and he was inconsistent in his policies governing matters such as hair length. When Townsend announced extensions of tour, one crew member claimed, he would say it was "a blessing in disguise." In such an atmosphere, already tense because of the long work hours and few shore leaves, little irritations festered into permanent sores, and idle talk ballooned into wild rumor.

Some scuffling between blacks and whites began in early October. The blacks circulated--and believed--a report that the whites had hired a karate expert to intimidate them. They also took umbrage at a rumor that two blacks who had slugged whites had been thrown into the brig, while a white who had beaten up a black was given only a warning. Just before the riot, frequent fights flashed through an enlisted men's club in Subic Bay, where the ship was docked for resupply and recreation.

Two days after the ship weighed anchor and set its course for Viet Nam, trouble broke out in the mess hall. According to one version, a white mess cook refused to give a black two sandwiches instead of the usual one. The black swore and called him a honky, and the mess cook slugged him. In another version, a black stepped away from his mess tray without putting an OCCUPIED sign on it, and a white mess boy tried to take it away.

Whatever small spark started the conflagration, there was plenty of brittle tinder lying about to keep it going. A preliminary investigation report, put together by Navy officers and obtained by Downing last week, states that the riot really began when 30 or 40 blacks, screaming and yelling on the mess deck, were confronted by Marine guards with their nightsticks at the ready. According to the report, by the time the captain arrived, a couple of the blacks were holding chairs over their heads, and a white was exhorting the Marines to attack them with inflammatory remarks like, "Kill those niggers." At one point, a black mess cook grabbed a metal guard rail and heaved it at the Marines, striking the captain in the leg.

An all out free-for-all might still have been avoided, but was instead partially spurred on by a mix-up in orders. Fearing the worst, the ship's executive officer, Commander Ben Cloud, part black and part Indian, ordered all the blacks involved to the stern of the ship and the Marine guards toward the bow. A minute later, the captain countermanded the order, according to one witness, barking into the intercom "something like, 'If someone were to write a book on this cruise, this would have to be the most f--ed-up chapter. The exo has been misinformed. Problems are not as bad as they seem. Everyone go about their business.' "

Bites. Their business, at that point, was rioting. Armed with tie-down chains, clubs, knives and tools, groups of both whites and blacks rampaged through the berthing quarters of the ship. When the fighting subsided six hours later, 40 whites and six blacks were injured. During the fight, one black was struggling with a white Marine when the Marine took a bite out of the black's leg. "If a black comes in here with a human bite on his leg, I want to know about it," the Marine told a hospital corpsman later. A black did show up with a leg bite and was immediately arrested.

A congressional subcommittee is currently investigating the Kitty Hawk riot, along with racial outbreaks on the carrier Constellation and the oiler Hassayampa, to determine whether or not such problems stem from a lack of discipline in the Navy. Meanwhile, the manner in which the Kitty Hawk conducts its courts-martial will also be watched carefully. A biracial Pentagon task-force report on military justice, released last week by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, charged that there was a definite pattern of discrimination against blacks in the meting out of punishment. The report gave substance to black sailors' claims that recent riots have been fueled by discrimination; it also lent credence to recent statements by Elmo Zumwalt, chief of naval operations, who has attributed such insurrections to the fact that the Navy's "middle management" has not carried out his myriad programs to ease racial tension, rather than to any lack of discipline that could be traced to his reforms of traditional Navy regulations.

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